Event Date: 31 May 2012 Hartwell Room The British Museum Great Russell Street London WC1B 3DG

Sloane’s Treasures – Workshop 2: Sloane’s ‘Artificial Rareties’

Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) was a doctor who collected curiosities with a passion. Although he always hoped society would benefit, he would be astonished at the scale of the enterprise he started…

Hans Sloane was one of the great men of early eighteenth-century London, a wealthy and popular physician to high society and royalty. But it was the natural sciences, especially botany, which fired his interest.
In his long life, he amassed one of the greatest ever private collections of plants, animals, antiquities, coins and other curios. It was to be the founding core of the British Museum and later the Natural History Museum.

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Break-out discussion sessions based on the seven initial presentations developing ideas for research on them further
Brief Reports from groups (five minutes each), chaired by JD Hill, Research, BM AUDIO HERE
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Second series of break-out sessions
Brief Reports from groups (five minutes each) chaired by James Delbourgo AUDIO HERE
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Final discussion and summary, chaired by James Delbourgo, Rutgers

This is the first gathering of this kind of experts on medieval medical prognosis. While scholarly work has been carried out on certain examples of the wide range of medical prognostics extant from the Middle Ages, there has to date been no gathering of experts in the field, nor any focused collection of papers devoted to this topic.

Medical prognostics ranged from high-end, learned methods, such as the Hippocratic-Galenic ‘Signs of Death’, astrological predictions, uroscopy and sphygmology (pulse-reading), to ‘occult’ practices, such as divination (the interpretation of signs) and ritual magic, through to ‘popular’ experiments, such as the practice of throwing a piece of lard at a dog and working out the fate of the patient depending on the dog’s reaction. Therefore, prognosis was far from the territory of the educated physician alone. It was carried out by people from a broad range of social backgrounds.

As well as being experts in the field, the speakers chosen for the day work on a broad range of topics and all are expert in the relevant manuscripts. The keynote speaker, Charles Burnett of the Warburg Institute, has worked on a vast array of Latin, Greek and Arabic prognostic devices, most notably astrology and divination; Linda Ehrsam Voigts of the University of Missouri is an expert in Middle English scientific texts and will present on Bernard de Gordon’s De prognosticatione; Peter Jones of King’s College, Cambridge will give a paper on fifteenth-century practitioners’ use of prognostics; M. Teresa Tavormina, Professor of English at Michigan State University, who has published widely on medicine in medieval English literature, will present on the prognostic content of Middle English uroscopies; Sandor Chardonnens, who has worked on Anglo-Saxon prognostics, will turn his attention to the use of late medieval English astrological manuscripts; Luke Demaitre of the University of Virginia, who has researched many aspects of medieval medicine, including learned prognosis, will present on Bernard de Gordon’s translation of a geomantic treatise; Glen M. Cooper, Professor of History at Brigham Young University, who has recently produced an edition of Galen’s On Critical Days from Greek into Arabic will turn his attention to astrology in intellectual thought in the Latin West in the later Middle Ages; and Laurence Moulinier-Brogi, well-known for several articles on uroscopy and on the medicine of Hildegard of Bingen, will present on William the Englishman’s fascinating thirteenth-century tract, De urina non visa.

As well as these eminent speakers, Sophie Page and Bill MacLehose, both of UCL, will chair two of the day’s panels. Sophie works on magic, astrology and natural philosophy, and Bill on medieval medicine. Their contribution to the day will be invaluable.

The two organisers will also be involved in presenting on the day – Jo Edge will give a paper on her PhD research into The Sphere of Life and Death in late medieval England, and Peregrine Horden will offer closing remarks

The University of Northampton is proud to present an exciting day of postcolonial performance, poetry and visual culture at Avenue Campus, School of the Arts.

The Seeing and Being Seen: Postcolonial Visual Culture and Performance Symposium will be convening at 10:30 am and starting at 11:00am, the day will begin with the unique opportunity of hearing Karthika Naїr and Slam poet Polarbear discussing their innovative and prestigious 2012 Laurence Olivier award winning dance production, ‘Desh’ before moving on to a presentation by performance artists, Dr Mark James Hamilton and Rosanna Raymond.

Themes relating to postcolonial cinema, theatre and visual culture will also be addressed by among others, Professors Dominic Alessio and Patrick Williams as well as by exciting upcoming scholars, Arifani Moyo (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Anna Maria Everding (University of Northampton).

The day will end on an upbeat note with Polarbear performing a selection of his Slam Poetry.

Second Annual Development Studies Lecture: ‘The Politics of Food and the Arab Spring’

Professor Jane Harrigan (SOAS) - The Politics of Food and the Arab Spring

This lecture assesses the extent to which the sharp spikes in global food prices, which occurred in 2007/08 and 2010/11, contributed to the political unrest which swept the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region at the end of 2010 and the first half of 2011. This political unrest has been referred to as the “Arab Spring” and the lecture argues that although the Arab Spring has been referred to in the Western media as a predominantly politically-motivated uprising against autocratic incumbent regimes, there were important socio-economic underpinnings to the uprising. One such important factor was increasing food prices in many countries of the MENA region. The result of rising food prices, along with other socio-economic factors, such as high levels of unemployment, especially amongst educated youth, was a steady increase in the cost of living and an erosion of living standards. Many incumbent regimes in MENA had for decades maintained their legitimacy via an implicit social contract, whereby the regimes offered cheap subsidised food, housing, utilities and fuel along with guaranteed employment in a bloated public sector in exchange for political loyalty. Sharp rises in domestic food prices from 2007 onwards contributed to an unravelling of this social contract such that citizens in the region were no longer willing to tolerate repressive and autocratic governments. The rise in domestic food prices was linked to global food price increases and is a reflection of the food security status of the MENA region, whereby most countries in the region are heavily dependent on imported food. As a result of the role played by food prices in creating political unrest, many countries in the region are now reappraising their food security strategies in an attempt to place less reliance on global food markets.

A Reading by Doron Rabinovici

Doron Rabinovici, a novelist, essayist, and historian, was born in 1961 in Tel Aviv and has lived in Vienna since 1964. He has written three novels and a collection of short stories as well as important works of nonfiction. He will read from his most recent novel, Andernorts (Elsewhere), which was short-listed for the German Book Prize in 2010. The novel’s protagonist, Israeli academic Ethan Rosen, works on a polemic article attacking his biggest rival for a professorship, Rudi Klausinger, while on route from Tel Aviv to Vienna. On arrival in Vienna he receives the news that his father is in the hospital and immediately returns to Israel. There he discovers that Klausinger is not just in competition with him on a professional level …

Doron Rabinovici is a prominent and politically engaged intellectual in Austria. In his writing he takes up central political and sociological issues such as identity politics, victimhood, the moral obligation to remember the Shoah, German and Austrian responsibility, Israel, anti-Semitism, and the inevitable skewing of a message by its medium, and turns them inside out and back upon themselves.

When the First Player dissolves in tears as he recites scenes from the fall of Troy, Hamlet exclaims at the intensity of the actor’s identification, by contrast with his own frozen feelings and incapacity. Hecuba’s tragedy becomes the emblem of empathy, produced more intensely by dramatic representation than by real life.
Recent, near obsessive returns to the Iliad and the matter of Troy, refract current conflicts, and these renderings and revisionings act upon the emotions and attitudes of the spectator and the reader. Marina Warner will explore the way this return to the most ancient war in literature, especially in the work of women writers and artists, makes a claim for the function of art and realigns the question of catharsis.

Marina Warner is Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, and currently visiting professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is a writer of fiction, criticism and history, and her many publications include studies of art, myths, symbols and fairy tales, as well as novels and short stories. She is the author of (among others): Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) a provocative and highly influential study of Roman Catholic adoration of the Virgin Mary; Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985); Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (Reith Lectures) (1994); No Go the Bogey-man: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (1998), a study of the male terror figure from ancient myth and folklore to modern obsessions; Signs & Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture (2003); and Phantasmagoria (2006), which traces the ways in which ‘the spirit’ has been represented across different mediums, from waxworks to cinema. Professor Warner was elected a Fellow of the (2006), which traces the ways in which ‘the spirit’ has been represented across different mediums, from waxworks to cinema. Professor Warner was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature| in 1984 and of the British Academy in 2005. In 2008 she was awarded a CBE for services to literature, and is currently President of the British Comparative Literature Association. Her most recent book, Stranger Magic: Charmed States & The Arabian Nights, published by Chatto & Windus in 2011, is a groundbreaking study that shows how magic helped to create the modern world, and how it is still deeply inscribed in the way we think today.

This two day workshop in May 2012 in Bedford Square, London will examine the role played by global financial investments in land markets and globalised networks of capital in slums of developing countries. It questions some of the underlying assumptions through which informal housing in the global South has been understood, gives insights into new emerging forms of marginality, highlights contradictory, complex tensions that emerge for donors, governments, and NGOs in relation to the urban poor. The workshop draws together interdisciplinary intellectual debates, key conceptual, political and policy lessons which will enable a new research agenda for work in informal housing in the global South. Leading academic scholars working on informal housing issues and NGO practitioners will be the main selective participants in the workshop.

David Satterthwaite (International Institute for Environment and Development IIED) -Some notes about the housing sub-markets used by those with limited incomes in urban areas in Africa, Asia and Latin America
[AUDIO HERE]

David Wills has written widely on literary theory, especially the work of Jacques Derrida, film theory, and comparative literature. He has translated numerous texts by Jacques Derrida including The Gift of Death (Chicago UP, 1995) and The Animal That Therefore I Am (Fordham UP, 2008) and is the author of several books including Prosthesis (Stanford UP, 1995) and Dorsality: Thinking Back Through Technology and Politics (U of Minnesota Press, 2008).

Branka Arsic specialises in nineteenth-century literature and culture, and early American literature. She is the author of On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Harvard UP, 2010), and a book on Melville entitled Passive Constitutions or 7½ Times Bartleby (StanfordUP, 2007). She has co-edited (with Cary Wolfe) a collection of essays on Emerson, entitled The Other Emerson: New Approaches, Divergent Paths (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).